*****************************

The following dispatch was captured in mid-broadcast, as it were, and translated--appropriately interpreted where necessary--by Doctor Heinrich Korazinski of SETI. Although the sub-space recording has been verified and accepted as genuine by the scientific community, Doctor Korazinski refuses to reveal how he understood the alien language. One can only guess.

*****************************

Galactic Survey Report: Sector VL9478K: Year of Zordac - 10293

Farther out on the rim, beyond the cluster of planets previously discovered on which sentient life exists--delineated in last period's Survey Report VK9476J--a long-distance scan detected sentience. Deciding that an "outpost" planet might establish a precedent for Core Community expansion, we proceeded to its location. Our report follows:

We have been studying a remote and isolated life-giving planet within a system of eight planets and countless planetoids, asteroids, and comets orbiting a medium-sized sun. This fortuitously positioned planet is quite beautiful to behold, consisting of an estimated 70 to 80 percent water, high mountain ranges, and broad forests. The poles are covered by ice. It is extremely volatile due to volcanoes, earthquakes, and tectonic dynamics, and possesses a strong magnetic field providing protection. As well, the global climate is continually undergoing transformation, rejuvenating the biosphere of both flora and fauna. After extensive and detailed analysis of its sentient populations, we offer our findings and conclusions in this report.

Several of its species--to be described in appearance and behavior in that section below--are quite intelligent and capable of communicating clearly and thoughtfully to one another. They nurture their offspring effectively, teaching them what they need to know for the continuance of their specific species. Sharing the resources of the planet as it goes through its transformations seems uppermost in their minds. Unfortunately, the equanimity one would expect from this tacitly understood set of relationships is in evidence only on an isolated and limited scale due to one particular species which has exponentially surpassed the others both in complexity and technological innovations.

Not only are some select innovations--to be described later--affecting negatively the living conditions of both flora and fauna on the planet, including, most significantly, the other sentients, but would appear to be the likely cause of their own imminent demise--an educated probability in the high ninety percentile. They demonstrate, through their overt behavior, no awareness or understanding of their interdependent relationship with the rest of the biosphere, indicating a crippling incapacity to experience empathy. Simultaneously, they are actively and disproportionately depleting the planet's resources at an alarming rate with no regard for their future well-being or that of their progeny. From what we've been able to garner by monitoring their communications media, they believe, for no practical reasons we can decipher, that future generations will discover technological and biological means to correct for any shortcomings or abcence of necessities formerly found in nature and thereby continue their lineage.

Their actions are insular, self-motivated, and short-sighted, conforming in character to those of the apex sentients studied on planet GH4862F referred to in our last report. They are wild, reckless, and unruly, at a stage in their development displaying primitive emotional and perceptual intelligence and instinctive motivations. Ordinarily, based on our studies of other planets dominated by a single primitive species, it would only be a question of time before they matured. However, because of the psychosomatic span separating them from the other sentients who, as we have seen in other cases, would act as an impediment to accelerated growth, we don't see this as very likely.

Their evolution seems to have taken a dead-end path at the last fork in the road, some 200,000 of their years ago. We estimate they have little solar time remaining especially as they pose a threat to the rest of their natural world. Because of their incapacity to appreciate their proper place and role--their purpose--in the overall architecture of the living planet that spawned them, and their irrational and incredulously destructive behavior towards other members of their own species, it is our unanimous recommendation that they, the dominant species, not be contacted for membership in the Galactic Core Community (GCC).

The planet itself, as we've pointed out, and the other sentients--as well the other life forms of every order--would make a suitable and valued addition; however, because of the overwhelming influence of the apex species, we advise indefinite quarantine of planet JH7325T. Perhaps in a thousand of their years when we return, that particular species will have become extinct--for reasons that can only be speculated on but are suggested by their current morbid preoccupation with and mysterious innate proclivity for self-destruction--and the biosphere on its way to returning to a state of balance. In which case, a favorable assessment may be ascertained and contact approved.

Detailed transcripts and representative statistics follow.

*****************************